Reincarnation
If there is a loving God and a damnation or similar punishment for those who fail to pick the right God, it follows that reincarnation must exist. Here's the formula that leads to this conclusion: ---- *Sub-premise 1a: An infinitely good being (and one could substitute "completely good" here with the same result) would be infinite in every virtuous characteristic. *Sub-premise 1b: Patience is a virtuous characteristic (I recall that even the Trix rabbit said this once in a commercial). Minor conclusion: An infinitely good being would have infinite patience. ---- *Sub-premise 2a: Man is presented with a limited lifetime that is by definition insufficient to consider the many lifetimes worth of information that has been generated, much less to pick out that information which is vital to the salvation of the soul -- if such salvation exists. *Sub-premise 2b: Since a human lifetime is limited, a sufficient amount of time given to determine the right information must, for some, come through multiple lifetimes. *Sub-premise 2c: A God that was both eternal and possessed of infinite patience would have the ability and the desire to give each human sufficient time to discover the vital information for salvation. *Sub-premise 2d: A God that was omnipotent (whether this omnipotence was relative or absolute) would have the power to permit people to be reincarnated as many times as it took for information vital to salvation to be discovered. Major conclusion: If there is a God that is eternal and infinitely good, and there is a potential eternal punishment for failing to realize certain knowledge in life, then such God must reincarnate us (or permit us to be reincarnated) enough times to discover the information vital for salvation. ---- For those who wish to contest this conclusion, the question remaining whether their model of God is one that is not completely or infinitely good, or is it just one that is not powerful enough to cause or permit reincarnation? Words in any faith's scripture that contradicts this would merely establish that said scripture was flawed. Pandeism is not inherently a reincarnation-heavy belief system, but some ideas (if not actual beliefs) about reincarnation are not to the dismay of my general theological model, with the idea that we are bits of the energy temporarily dispersed from the greater holistic energy of our Creator. It might indeed be possible that whatever energy goes into what could be called the human soul may be recycled into other souls. But, you see, not necessarily all at once. Picture this: you have three cups of Gatorade, one lemon-lime (being a light green), one fruit punch (red, naturally or artificially), and one riptide rush (which is basically grape and therefore a hazy purple). These are the souls of some existing persons who die. Now, pour those three cups into a bowl and they will run together (and the color will probably be some unappetizing dark greenish-brown, but unimportant in this analogy). And now, pour out the contents of that bowl into three new cups, and you have created three unique new mixes, although you might with a CSI team backing you be able to figure out how much of each original flavor went into each of the new blends. Or, if you're that good, perhaps you'll know by taste alone. But instead of a bowl to which three cups are added, what we have is an ocean of cosmic proportion, and billions of billions of cups, and they are constantly going out and coming in. And there, then, you would have the human race. Naturally, with the population constantly expanding you have "new" material (i.e. additional energy never before contained within a soul) being added to the mix all the time, mixed in with that of the oldest souls, which are getting stretched thin). And so, ultimately, every one of us has some drop of most every person who has lived before-- there's a little bit of Jesus in all of us, a little bit of the Buddha, some of Moses and Muhammed and Confucious and a random Aztec warrior and the first aborigine to set foot in Australia, and the ancestors of the Vikings and the Zulu and the Ainu and the Sioux. Perhaps bits and pieces of the previous memories and personalities survive, which would explain a lot of things, deja vu, strange dreams, some internal conflict and turmoil, even mental illnesses!! But, I also think that some personality aspects would randomly and fortuitously blend to make a particularly strong mix. And the point of such a process would be to improve the quality of these bits and pieces through mixing, cooking in the oven of life experience, then remixing and cooking some more. And so, like the folding and refolding of steel to cauterize impurities, perhaps the stuff that souls are made of is similarly purified, rarefied, led to the point where it is worthy of rejoining our Creator when the Universe meets its end!!